More than half - 59 per cent - of US workers made redundant or who left their job last year admitted swiping confidential corporate data, such as customer list, before they left, a new study claims.
A web-based survey of 1,000 workers who lost or walked out of their jobs in 2008 by the Ponemon Institute and Symantec found the …

COMMENTS

oh yeah

I walked off my last job as a sysadmin with a full list of passwords, and left a backdoor into the network as well. Just as well, as I had spent eight years putting that system in place, and my successor had a fortnight to learn it all. If she hadn't been able to ask me back in to sort out some issues, her job would have been almost impossible.

Not everyone who leaves with company data does so with malign intentions.

Duh?

How is this shocking to anybody but the Suits? Ask almost anyone who works in retail whether they care about "shrinkage" of stock - if the corporation is basically regarded as a necessary enemy to whom one must swallow one's pride and suck up to in order to survive, of course they're going to shank the corporation in the back at the first opportunity. And tightening your controls over the survivors isn't going to make them want to do that any less... quite the opposite.

If your insiders regard you as a bigger enemy than they regard your competitors, you have a problem. Perhaps you shouldn't be taking Dilbert cartoons as some sort of instruction manual?

OOOH Knowledge is Power.

and the fact they are bringing home a piece of information should be worrying because they never had access to that information before ??? And they never had a chance to take a full copy of their HDD before being fired.

Well ... looks like Cimentech is playing the scaremonger to sell some MIB like Memory-erasing devices.

Scruples?

News Flash

Polar Bears really do shit where it's cold, the Pope is Catholic, and the most shocking revelation: Water is wet /gasps. I mean come on did we really need another "study" showing that information routinely walks out with ex employees? Seriously any study obviously backed by a company punting products they sell to prevent the results outlined in said study should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

But stay tuned tomorrow when I break details of the most shocking story of all time. Are you ready for this? Hold on to your hats people, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The results of an enormously expensive and detailed study proving this conclusively will appear tomorrow.

Paris cus even she would read this article and say "Duh! Thanks for the input captain obvious".

No doubt

All those laid-off assembly workers at GM had gobs of data on--what? The GM dealership structure? The specs of the Chevy Suburban? And I bet the laid-off construction workers are hauling just GBs of confidential data away.

Yes, it's a good idea to keep your data from walking out the door. But do three of five employees have access to sensitive data? It seems unlikely to me.

My responses to this

A) Super classy guys. I'd never CONSIDER walking off with confidential data. The golden rule applies -- would you want some guy to walk off with YOUR data? I did not think so.

B) Not too surprised. Many US companies just treat people like replaceable cogs rather than people. Employees know when they are not valued but treated as cogs, and react accordingly -- by swiping whatever they can on the way out.

Pfft

majority

And, it seems, the majority of such leaks could be avoided just by treating the employees right. But of course that'll never come up as a potential solution.

Seems to me that the employees are just following the lead of their management in most cases. The concept of "corporate ethics" is a joke that is followed more in the breach.

I also wonder if they're also counting employees copying the data so they can keep in touch with the people who actually gave a damn about them - their customers - rather than actually intending to use the data for so-called "nefarious" ends.

All in all, sounds like another press release by a company trying to sell me something.

Been there, done that

Took a cut of my teams source code home with me on USB stick before I left. Nothing nefarious in mind however. My memory is like a sieve, and if I want a quick way to do X, I don't want to 'reinvent the wheel' and have it come out as a square. I wanna quick squiz at the old code and and go 'ah yes, that's right!' and continue on happily.

Now obviously the 'real' developers out there have their own personal utils libraries to call on, ones they'd developed over the years in their spare time, beavering away in their dark rooms after getting home from work, generally ignoring life around them etc etc. Those people will scoffing at me I'm sure. Scoff away.

Fair enough

Statistics and such...

More than half stole information? I find it hard to believe that half even had access to said information let alone had the poor morals to steal it! What I do believe is that here we have another bit of self serving 'statistical' information that is totally made up to suit the needs of someone who wants to sell some kind of product or service.

honesty?

great commenting as per usual folks.

my perspective on this is a simple one. never take what does not belong to you. what goes around comes around..

all these people with all this information, and unless a.) they're staring their own related business, or b.) has/will have an unethical employer who wants that info, the data is generally useless. if they're caught with it, then what?

if they told a potential employer they have this information, they would never be hired (unless specifically to get that information), because the interviewer would immediately realize that this potential employee will most likely steal their data.

whatever happened to simple honesty and trustworthiness?

it doesn't matter if you have been mistreated. that doesn't give the right to mistreat in return. nobody ever said that life was fair, so don't expect it to be.

They may as well have said...

Re:Right, like most companies don't already know this?

I know a guy this happened to. His former employee wanted to downsize so, not wanting to fork out a redundancy payout, they contrived to stitch him up and sack him.

Trouble was he was bloody good at his job (it was mostly jealousy from certain senior reps that got him targeted), so when he went, he went with fully half of their customers, right into the arms of his very grateful current employer.

He's now on a very good earner, and his previous employer went tits-up a few months after he left.

Lots of smiles

Utter bolleaux. Most employees who utter such phrases are, in my experience, whining, money-for-nothing-seeking, juvenile twerps who wouldn't think they were being "treated right" if their employers gave them seven-hour lunchbreaks and a free pass to the local house of ill-repute.

Nicking the company's christmas-card list has naff-all to do with how the employer treated the employee and all to do with how the employee perceives the value of the information to a buyer or in his or her next job.

The NHS...

.. employs (both perm and contract) a LOT of people who have access to a LOT (pretty much EVERYONES, all in all, "Private" too, so not just the serfs) personal medical information (history, pharma requirements, ailments, lifestyle) as stored on, ahem, "super high security clinical systems" ( which they only get access to by, er, asking for the login details of a friendly doc, or practice manager...that's if it's not just commonly %systemname% / %blank% or similar).

I can see why the PCTs may want to retain as many of their IT staff as possible, and as Alacrity suggests, treat em well - certainly those who work on clinical systems day in day out, as many do. Or at least make any parting of ways amicable, if at all possible.

One could envision a situation where the disgruntled tech might be inclined to siphon off and sell that information to less scrupulous...oh hang on, I mean, insurance companies, just for example. Or worse (arguably) to criminal organisations (other than insurance companies and governments), who could punt cheap drugs at them, blackmail, extortion etc. Still, if the Gov'ts get their way with all their supergay uber databases, ( Spine, National CRS etc ), I'm quite sure the `big boys` will get all the unfettered access they desire anyway. "Secure".... Meh. : /

NHS...Everyones concern...

It's the (many many) techs at varying levels who work on the clinical systems in the NHS that you should worry about - they have access to lots of VERY personal information on ALL of you (Private and NHS, so not just the peasants this affects...).

And THOSE systems are nowhere near as secure (technically or practically) as many would like to think. Individuals medical records are VERY revealing and presumably worth quite a bit commercially to unscrupulous criminal organisations ,insurance companies, for example, and so on.

John - Tsk, it's not the `Christmas card list ` as you put it that we need to worry about!

Still, all this is pretty much irrelevant if the Gov'ts get their way with their retarded Orwellian information age uber databases, such as the Spine and National CRS, as these will ultimately, almost beyond any doubt, be open to the `highest bidder` or most shadowy QuaNGOs anyway. What a wonderful world! :)